tapman.net

There's a lot of talk these days (alright, for at least the last 20 years) about the rising costs of health care in America. It's an obvious problem for virtually everyone because we all end up paying for health-related stuff at one point or another. A less prominent aspect of the situation is the government's stated desire to reduce costs through direct action.

This article, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200811/airport-security, on airport security continues the long expose on stupid American security protocols. Yet another example of why we need better schools.

As with so many things in life, web hosting is a more complicated problem than at first appears. I particularly notice this now as I'm involved with several websites, each with different objectives. One of the most interesting problems is finding the right balance of security.

A bug in Fedora 9 when installed as a guest OS in VMware causes the mouse pointer to be offset by a variable amount. This makes it virtually impossible to use the mouse.

One of the reasons I don't like the Emergency Economic Act of 2008 is that we are, to at least some degree, doing this to prevent stories about people losing everything. While it's understandable to want to help other people avoid economic hardship, and even morally required to assist in some way, it's not a good reason to save the institutions that are failing.

I took a bit of time today to read the proposed legislation, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, and see for myself what our elected leaders are trying to do. Unfortunately, it took a while because I kept stumbling on pieces of insanity like this...

I'm constantly amazed by the disconnect between people's actions and thoughts. Nowhere is this more evident than on the road during inclement weather.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2008/08/professorial_product...

This article at the Economist is amusing to say the least. Those that know me well will recognize my cynical outlook on higher education, well served by the quote from Oscar Wilde, "Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."

I've always hated the term blog but embraced the concept of the blog. Not a diary keeper, I've often liked the idea of putting my thoughts on paper but being essentially a pragmatic person I've never figured out why I'd keep a diary. The blog format, an online diary of sorts, solve that usefulness question. Because the thoughts are captured in a logical structure, digitally encoded English, they are easily searched, sorted, and archived for later use. It's one of those oddities of life that the delivery medium impacts the usefulness of the thing.

Well, in an unfortunate turn of events I accidentally deleted the database containing all of this site's old Wordpress content. It was one of those commands that I knew was bad as soon as I hit Enter; I just didn't realize how bad until I realized that I didn't have anything close to a current backup of the database.

I've moved most of the useful old posts to this page for future reference.